IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) updates are now released as quarterly cumulative fixes to enable you to get the latest fixes and product enhancements with a simple in-place upgrade. IBM BPM 8.5.7 Cumulative Fix 2017.03 is now available for you to download and upgrade today. Key highlights are outlined below. See Knowledge Center for full details.

BPM on Cloud enhanced to accelerate your process initiatives

Use the IBM Client Success Portal for managing operational and technical support issues.

Easily trade up from the recently released Express edition to the full version of BPM on Cloud within the same instance when you need to grow.

Coaches expanded for interactive business UIs

Enhances BPM coaches with a new UI event framework and tooling based on the Salient Process SPARK technology, proving the foundation to embed the SPARK UI controls in a future update to IBM BPM.

Dennis Parrott is a Senior Offering Manager for IBM BPM within the Smarter Process group at IBM. Dennis is passionate about Business Process Management (BPM), which has been his primary focus throughout his career spanning more than 25 years. Starting with a development background, Dennis turned his talents to consulting which led to a position with Lombardi Software in 2007, where he was one of the first Lombardi consultants in Europe helping early adopters to successfully build and deploy BPM solutions. Dennis joined IBM in 2010 when Lombardi was acquired, and in 2013 he returned to his development roots, but this time as an offering manager. In addition to managing each new IBM BPM release, Dennis is personally responsible for new capabilities for improving the business user experience. In recent releases Dennis helped to define the requirements for the Coach Framework, was responsible for mobile enablement, process federation, the responsive IBM Process Portal and developer tools for building modern coach-based user interfaces. Dennis recently lead a team on authoring the IBM Redbook "Deliver Modern UI for IBM BPM with the Coach Framework and Other Approaches" [http://ibm.biz/BPMUIRedbook]

5 comments on"IBM BPM 8.5.7 CF2017.03 will be available on 31 March 2017"

Not quite yet. We have been working in collaboration with Salient Process to make updates to the SPARK UI toolkit and IBM BPM over the past 9 months in preparation to roll the SPARK UI toolkit into IBM BPM in a future BPM release. Salient Process have been rolling out incremental updates in new releases of their SPARK UI toolkit throughout this period. We also updated the BPM theme in BPM 8.5.7 CF2016.12 in December to be compatible with the SPARK UI toolkit, and we have incorporated the SPARK UI event framework in BPM 8.5.7 CF2017.03 in March. Salient Process will subsequently release another version of the SPARK UI toolkit that will use the embedded event framework. We currently plan to embed the SPARK UI controls in IBM BPM by the end of June. NOTE: all future plans are subject to change, so customers should be aware that this is our intention, but not a guarantee. Once the controls are embedded in IBM BPM then customers will be able to upgrade to take advantage of this under the BPM license. Existing SPARK UI toolkit customers will be able to upgrade – the intention is to make this as seamless as possible to minimize manual migration steps. Customers on older BPM releases will still be able to purchase the SPARK UI toolkit with IBM Enhanced Support, so they can leverage these amazing capabilities.

Once IBM BPM includes embedded SPARK UI controls within a new BPM UI toolkit then these will become the default stock controls. Customers using older controls like DOJO, Angular JS, or their own custom controls will still be able to use these as before.